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Here's the deal. Your wife will put on weight when she's pregnant. This weight may take time to come off, especially if she gets pregnant again within a couple years. She might spend most of her child bearing years overweight. If you try to control this or punish her, you put her health and the health of your children at risk. This comes across as really severe.
If all you mean is "Don't get tatoos or medical procedures without telling me first" then that's fine. But there's a spectrum between that and "I will track what you eat, how much you exercise, and select your wardrobe" which is how it kind of came across the first comment.
I've said it before (though I can't find the link at present), if she's willing to bear and raise my children, she will receive my reverence eternally even if her looks slide.
Indeed, that's part of the point. If she is willing to accept the travails of pregnancy, I will dig in deep to my provider role, and will accept the tradeoffs to her personal appearance because the outcome we're achieving is SO mutually beneficial I can't imagine deciding against it. My consent to her gaining weight is both implicit in the act of getting pregnant and I will happily make it explicit and praise her to the heavens for the sacrifice.
I'm mostly seeking the parts of a good and compatible personality that happen to correspond with keeping oneself healthy and aesthetically pleasing... while not overindexing on that measure.
Because guess what, those are traits I'd like to pass on to and inculcate in my kids! Its all tied up in the same ultimate objective.
Yes, and I'm suggesting you should interrogate a bit why you jumped to THAT interpretation from the rip rather than asking clarifying questions. "I will get a final say in how she dresses and maintains herself," to me, means closer to "she's making decisions independently (or with my counsel), but I hold veto power when I think it necessary." Tracking how much she eats and exercises sounds like a freaking DRAG, man. Although maybe more possible with AI agents. She wants to get ice cream for dessert I will provide without blinking. She wants to eat ice cream for every meal... imma put my foot down.
I try to be as specific as I can and avoid ambiguity in my language, and don't always succeed, but man, if I wanted to say "I WILL CONTROL ALL HER FOOD INTAKE AND WILL PHYSICALLY RESTRAIN HER FROM GETTING A HAIRCUT" I would have said that.
And whilst I can SEE how you could get to that interpretation, I would suggest that isn't the most charitable or straightforward takeaway unless your priors suggest any signal of wanting some control in a relationship indicates being a micromanaging overbearing control freak.
Hopefully I've given sufficient clarity now.
A lot of the language you used implied very strict control against a woman's wishes.
"additional authority... that a lot of women ALSO don't want to grant" "I will make final decisions...I will dictate I will get a final say in how she dresses and maintains herself"
So yes, control over her physical appearance, which would require control over her food and exercise.
"The whole house is indeed my castle," good luck with that when you get small kids. It's clear that you think of yourself as a benevolent dictator, but your still describing a dictatorship.
"fair and equitable for any woman willing to help raise my kids." Language imply that this control persists after she's had kids, and that the kids are yours (singular) not yours (plural).
I'm glad to hear that your expectations are not quite that severe but the language you used did encourage a more severe interpretation.
I mean, I noted that women left to their own devices have gotten fat, covered in tattoos, and do weird things with their hair. And they're abjectly unhappy too.
Who else should rein them in, if NOT their husbands?
Yes. Actual dictators have wives too.
But I only extend my dicatorship to the boundaries of my actual, personal property. And, it turns out, I don't view a wife as personal property.
Do you think the phrase "help raise my kids" implies that I'll be involved with and assisting this process too, as in there's mutual exchange here?
I dunno, once again I just try to use the terms that actually express my beliefs as precisely as possible. You're pattern matching them to a type of guy that is basically nonexistent in the modern era.
So have men. This is just a large part of Western culture at this point.
Yeah, except as with EVERY OTHER SOCIAL TREND, its more women than men. Same with LGBT identification.
This is all tied up in the same basic cause.
If you want to reverse it, target the more susceptible gender.
Its the women.
If a trend affects women by 40% and men by 30% (or whatever percentages you prefer), then no, it's not.
Also, how would you go 'targetting the most susceptible gender' with, for example, social media? Ban social media but only for women? If social media is bad for everyone but worse for women, why ignore the harm to men?
You also conveniently omit the social trends that are affecting men more, like video game, porn and gambling addictions.
Your approach is like the mirror of those 'tell men rape is wrong' campaigns, where the point is clearly to scold men because the activist enjoys it, not because it'll work.
Do you not think an effect size that is 25% larger is significant, meaningful, important?
Okay.
Young women are over twice as likely to say social media has influenced their opinions than young men.
Hence why young women are about 2-3x more likely to identify as liberal/democrat than young men, ENTIRELY explained by the women shifting whilst the men stay steady.
Which, well, we notice that white liberals have the highest rates of poor mental health among political ideologies.
And women are at least 2x as likely to be on antidepressant medication than males. This divide is starker among the younger generation (i.e. the trend has changed for the worse in women only.)
Quoth:
So this all tracks.
And they're now less likely than men to want to get married. Female desire to get married dropped by 22 percentage points over 50 years. Male's dropped... 2. Its the women.
Female religiosity and church attendance dropped off a cliff. from 30% unaffiliated to 50% unaffiliated in less than 10 years. A 20 point shift. Men's shifted... about 6 points. For the first time EVER there's a religiosity gap in favor of young men. Its the women.
Oh, and here's data that 3x as many women under 30 hold a negative view of young men, compared to the reverse. 21% vs. 7%. Oh its 'only" 14 points, right?
When does it become pure epistemic malfeasance to pretend these distinctions don't exist or don't have significant impact on outcomes?
Its the women.
I'm not ignoring the harm to men.
I'm just noticing that every single article examining gender-based social issues pathologizes male behavior and either implicitly or explicitly excuses female behavior. Its almost impossible to find article even WRITTEN by a male that explains their issues sympathetically.
Anyhow. Solutions? Here's my previous thoughts:
I'd like to see some feasible measure developed that can 'quantify' the benefits and harms of social media use and THEN we can craft policies that regulate the issue, just like we do with cigarettes, toxic waste, and like we USED to do with gambling. My general prescription is that we should add friction to the vices.
If we can provably detect that social media detracts from attention span, mental health, educational attainment, and financial stability, then surely we can discuss regulating them at the source, right?
(remember those studies I posted up there with women being more influenced by social media AND having worse mental health?) In practice, flat bans might be the ONLY thing that provides sufficient friction.
Other possible solutions: require women wear a watch device that counts down the days of their highest fertility so she's under no illusions about her timeline for marriage and kids.
My favorite proposal to bring up: Return the funding/loan standards for higher education to their pre-1993 levels. But this would detract from womens' ability to go to college so I'm SURE there'll be a fit pitched about it.
If it isn't clear by now I've considered this whole thing from just about every possible angle with as much data as I can find.
I'm still hammering away on my point here because I have yet to have a single solid refutation: Women's behavior has altered drastically over the past 30 years. Mens hasn't shifted that much.
Meanwhile EVERYONE reports being less happy.
Its the women.
This pitch would go over a lot better if you were to focus on girls, rather than women, and in more of a family and school context, rather than a romantic context. While it's true that an anxious and depressed girl is going to have all kinds of romantic trouble, focusing on that from the perspective of the man who would have liked to have dated her but now can't is way less socially acceptable. You can say they shouldn't be, but you're not going to change centuries of social programming, it's not a fence that's worth removing.
People actually are worried about the girls, and a lot of the negative affects set in in adolescence, especially among teenage girls. People like Abigail Shrier and Johnathan Haidt talk about that a lot, and there isn't all that much pushback about Haidt being a man, since forming young minds has been his area of interest for decades, and now he's interested in these depressed teenage girls; makes sense.
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